This year the conference was dedicated to the continuity in the study and conservation of the historical, cultural and scientific heritage of Karelia and neighboring regions, as well as to the ways to mainstream it, and to the forms of its representation in the modern world.
The conference participants were greeted by Ekaterina Smirnova, Leading Specialist of the Ministry of Ethnic and Regional Policy of the Republic of Karelia, Marina Nikishina, Director of the National Library of the Republic of Karelia, and Yulia Litvin, Deputy Director of the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History KarRC RAS.
- The conference theme was not random: continuity is currently given much attention, and cultural heritage in its various forms is connected with such notions as traditions, past, memory, values. These and many other issues will be the focus of the plenary and thematic sessions. Personally, I'd like to note that our main asset is people who preserve and multiply our heritage, sometimes in spite of the circumstances and trends of the time, - said Yulia Litvin.
The conference discusses the theoretical conceptualization of the cultural and scientific heritage of Karelia, the strategies and practices its conservation, the preservation of the languages and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Karelia and their role in the structure of ethnic and regional identities, the contribution of institutions and researchers, and many other issues. Presentations will be delivered in seven thematic and two plenary sessions.
The speakers at the first plenary session were architect Elena Itsikson with the lecture “House of the Chief Inspector of Mines – a witness of the history of Petrozavodsk” and Olga Ilyukha, Leading Researcher at ILLH KarRC RAS.
Doctor of History Olga Ilyukha at the Local Lore Conference
One of the main research interests for Doctor of History Olga Ilyukha is the history of education. The topic of her presentation at the conference was “The regional schoolbook as cultural heritage”. The scientist remarked that textbooks, which shape the worldview of a growing personality, are certainly part of the corpus of spiritual heritage. At the same time, textbooks are the least persistent books: their fates are affected by political cataclysms, and students easily part with them when the school year ends. The Republic of Karelia National Library now has an electronic collection of textbooks in ethnic languages of Karelia, comprising some 250 books.
The first regionally published schoolbooks appeared in Karelia in the 19th century. Regional textbook publishing, both in Soviet times and today, mainly deals with products for the primary school.
- An overwhelming majority of Soviet-era primary school textbooks are books for teaching reading in Finnish, Vepsian, and Karelian, and their history reflects the stages of the ethnic language policy. Linguists unanimously agree that Karelian and Vepsian language textbooks are a kind of monuments of written language development and the history of the literary norms of these languages. But their value is certainly much wider: they consist of carefully selected texts, which sum up into a sort of a narrative, broadcasting a certain image of the world, - emphasized Olga Ilyukha.
In her study, she traced how the discourse in local lore activitiies for schoolchildren has changed from the 1920s to the present day in connection with the political vector and the specific features of one or another period.
